Silence is complete.
Never in your life a silence like this one. One so utterly complete. Why should the crickets cease? Why? What reason? They have never stopped ever before. Not ever.
Unless. Unless —
Something is going to happen.
It is as if the whole ravine is tensing, bunching together its black fibres, drawing in power from all about sleeping countrysides, for miles and miles. From dew-sodden forest and dells and rolling hills where dogs tilt heads to moons, from all around the great silence is sucked into one centre, and you at the core of it. In ten seconds now, something will happen, something will happen. The crickets keep their truce, the stars are so low you can almost brush the tinsel. There are swarms of them, hot and sharp.
Growing, growing, the silence. Growing, growing the tenseness. Oh it’s so dark, so far away from everything. Oh God!
And then, way way off across the ravine:
‘Okay Mom! Coming, Mother!’
And again:
‘Hi, Mom! Coming, Mom!’
And then the quick scuttering of tennis shoes padding down through the pit of the ravine as three kids come dashing, giggling. Your brother Skipper, Chuck Redman and Augie Bartz. Running, giggling.
The stars suck up like the stung antennae of ten million snails.
The crickets sing!
The darkness pulls back, startled, shocked, angry. Pulls back, losing its appetite at being so rudely interrupted as it prepared to feed. As the dark retreats like a wave on a shore, three kids pile out of it, laughing.
‘Hi, Mom! Hi, Shorts! Hey!’
It smells like Skipper all right. Sweat and grass and his oiled leather baseball glove.
‘Young man, you’re going to get a licking,’ declares Mother. She puts away her fear instantly. You know she will never tell anybody of it, ever. It will be in her heart though, for all time, as it is in your heart, for all time.
You walk home to bed in the late summer night. You are glad Skipper is alive. Very glad. For a moment there you thought —
Far off in the dim moonlit country, over a viaduct and down a valley, a train goes rushing along and it whistles like a lost metal thing, nameless and running. You go to bed, shivering, beside your brother, listening to that train whistle, and thinking of a cousin who lived way out in the country where that train is now; a cousin who died of pneumonia late at night years and years ago. . .
You smell the sweat of Skip beside you. It is magic. You stop trembling. You hear footsteps outside the house on the sidewalk, as Mother is turning out the lights. A man clears his throat in a way you recognize.
Mom says, ‘That’s your father.’
It is.
There Was an Old Woman
‘NO, there’s no lief arguing. I got my mind fixed. You run along with your silly wicker basket. Land, land, where you ever get notions like that? You just skit out of here and don’t bother me, I got my tattin’ and knittin’ to do, and no never minds about tall dark gentlemen with fangled ideas.’
The tall dark young man stood quietly, not moving. Aunt Tildy hurried on with her talk.
‘You heard what I said, young man. If you got a mind to talk to me, well, you can talk, but meantime I hope you don’t mind if I pour myself a bit of coffee. There. If you’d been a bit more polite, I mighta offered you some; but you stride in here high and mighty and you never rapped on the door or nothing. I don’t like that kind of doing. You think you own the place.’
Aunt Tildy fussed with her lap. ‘Land, now, where’d I lay the yarn? I’m making myself a comforter. These winters get on mighty chill, I’ll allow, and it ain’t fittin’ for a lady with bones like rice-paper to be settin’ in a draughty old house like this without warmin’ herself.’
The tall dark man sat down.
‘That’s an antique chair, so be gentle on it,’ warned Aunt Tildy. ‘Now, if you wants to start again, tell me things you got to tell, I’ll listen respectful. But keep your voice in your shoes and stop staring at me with funny lights in your eyes. Land, it gives me the collie-wobbles.’
The bone-porcelain, flowered clock on the mantel finished chiming three. Out in the hall, grouped around the wicker basket, four men waited, quietly, hardly moving, as if they were frozen.
‘Now, about that wicker basket,’ said Aunt Tildy. ‘It’s past six feet long, and by the look of it, it ain’t laundry. And those four men you walked in with, you don’t need them to carry that basket — why, it’s light as thistles. Eh?’
The dark young man was leaning forward on the antique chair. Something in his face suggested that the basket wouldn’t be so light after a while. There’d be something in it.
‘Shaw, now.’ Aunt Tildy mused. ‘Now where’ve I seen wicker like that before? Seems it was only a couple year ago. Seems to me — oh! Now I remembers. Certainly I do. It was when Mrs. Dwyer passed away next door.’
Aunt Tildy set her coffee cup down, sternly. ‘So that’s what you’re up on? I thought you were workin’ to sell me something. Just set until my little Emily trounces home from college this afternoon! I wrote her a note the other day. Not admittin’, of course, that I wasn’t feelin’ quite ripe and pert, but sort of hintin’ I want to see her again, it’s been a bunch of weeks. She livin’ in New York and all. Almost like my own daughter, Emily is.
‘Now, she’ll take care of you, young man. She’ll shoo you out’n this parlour so quick it’ll — ‘
The dark young man looked at her as if she were tired.
‘No, I’m not,’ snapped Aunt Tildy.
He weaved back and forth on the chair, half shutting his eyes, resting himself. Maybe she would like to rest, too? Nice rest.
‘Great sons of Goshen on the Gilberry Dike! I got a hunderd comforters, two hunderds of sweaters and six hunderds of pot-holders in these fingers, no matter they’re skinny! You run away and come back when I’m done, and maybe I’ll talk to you.’ Aunt Tildy shifted subjects. ‘Let me tell you about Emily. She’s such a sweet, fair child.’
Aunt Tildy nodded thoughtfully. Emily. With hair like light yellow corn tassles, just as soft and sweet.
‘I well remembers the day her mother died, twenty years ago, leavin’ Emily to my house. That’s why I’m mad at you and your wickers and such goings-on. Who ever heard of people dyin’ for any good cause? Young man, I don’t like it. Why, I remembers — ‘
Aunt Tildy paused, a brief pain of memory touched her heart. She remembered twenty-five years back, her father’s voice in that old-time fragment:
‘Tildy,’ he’d said, ‘what are you going to do in life? The way you act, men don’t have much with you. Nothing permanent, I mean. You kiss and run. You don’t settle down and marry and raise children.’
‘Papa,’ Tildy snapped right back at him, ‘I like laughin’ and playin’ and singin’, but I’m not the marryin’ kind. You know why?’
‘Why?’ asked Papa.
‘I can’t find a man with my philosophy, Papa.’
‘What ‘philosophy’s’ that?’
‘That death is silly! And it is. It took Mama when we needed her most. Now, do you call that intelligent?’
Papa looked at her and his eyes got wet and grey and bleak. He patted her shoulder. ‘You’re always right, Tildy. But what can we do? Death comes to everybody.’
‘Fight back!’ she cried. ‘Strike it under the belt! Fight it! Don’t believe in it!’
‘It can’t be done,’ said Papa, sadly. ‘Each of us is all alone in the world.’
‘There’s got to be a start somewhere, Papa. I’m startin’ my own philosophy here and now,’ Tildy declared. ‘Why, it’s just silly that people live a couple years and then are dropped like a wet seed in a hole and nothing sprouts but a smell. What good do they do that way? They lay there a million years, helpin’ nobody. Most of them fine, nice and neat people, or at least tryin’.’
So, after a few years, Papa died. Aunt Tildy remembered how she’d tried to talk him out of it, but he passed on anyway. Then she ran off. She couldn’t stay with him after he was cold. He was a denial of her philosophy. She didn’t attend his burial. She didn’t do anything but set up this antique shop on the front of this old house and live alone for years, that is until Emily came. Tildy didn’t want to take the girl in. Why? Because Emily believed in dying. But her mother was an old friend, and Tildy had promised help.
‘Emily,’ continued Aunt Tildy, to the man in black, ‘was the first body to live in this house with me in years. I never got married. I didn’t like the idea of livin’ with a man twenty — thirty years and then have him up and die on me. It’d shake my philosophy down like a tower of cards. I shied away from the world pretty much. I guess I got pretty pernickety with people if they ever so much as mentioned death.’
The young man listened patiently, politely. Then he lifted his hand. He seemed to know everything, with the shine in his cheeks, without her opening her mouth. He knew about her and the last war, in 1917, when she never read a newspaper. He knew about the time when she
